Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Blame these Space News websites (Score 1) 74

They all seem to do it - Space.com, Spaceflightnow.com, Spacefellowship, Nasaspaceflight. They know their audience is educated yet they persist in writing articles with both metric or imperial units. Or worse, they mix them as in this instance. They also take the let-me-convert-everythgin-for-you approach and put the complementary units in parentheses. Why they don't just stick to one measurement system - SI makes the most sense - I do not know. However I do believe spaceflight enthusiasts are NOT idiots.
Patents

Patent Suit Leads To 500,000 Annoyed Software Users 180

ciaran_o_riordan writes "A rare glimpse at the human harm of a software patent lawsuit: company receives 500,000 calls complaining about video quality after a video call system was forced to change to avoid a patent. That's a lot of people having a bad day. We don't usually hear these details because the court documents get ordered sealed and the lawyers only say what the companys' communication strategists allow. However, for VirnetX v. Apple, Jeff Lease decided to go the hearings, take notes, and give them to a journalist. While most coverage is focussing on the fines involved, doubling or halving Apple's fine would have a much smaller impact on your day than the removal of a feature from some software you like. Instead of letting the software patents debate be reduced to calls for sympathy for big companies getting fined, what other evidence is out there, like this story, for harm caused directly to software users?"

Comment No, strongly disagree here (Score 0) 656

I earned a second major in Statistics alongside my Comp Sci degree. In my 25 years of systems programming, application programming, *nix, Windows, GUI apps, data gathering, data analysis, web, comms, you name it - in a wide variety of fields I have NEVER used any of my statistics knowledge more complicated than a mean or median to this day. Not one single bit.

Comment Throbber in early versions of Internet Explorer (Score 1) 93

I recall that at least one early version of Micosoft Internet Explorer back in the late 90s had the earth globe 'throbber' animation show, in sequence: the Americas, Europe, then the blue 'e' then back to the Americas. No Asia or Oceania. At the time I could hardly believe it that a giant company that had always promoted internationalisation of its software could have such a 'fail' moment.

Comment Now exacerbated by Firefox v20 ESC key disabling (Score 3, Informative) 196

Mozilla in their 'wisdom' decided to disable the ESC key that a lot of people used to stop animated gifs running https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=614304/. It also stopped the page loading - dead in its tracks - which I personally loved. However some Mozilla devs didn't like it (as scripts etc may not be loaded properly). So they've now taken control away from the annoyed user who is going to cop entire page loads of crap.

Comment Re: Not news. (Score 2) 288

Mod parent informative. These guys are nothing more than headhunters trying to pitch themselves at any top-notch dev that might come their way, but trying to play up how cool and Hollywood-movie-star the word 'Agent' sounds. Wow I even have visions of limos and red carpets wherever these smart devs go. If they are such smart devs and techs themselves, why have they felt the need to get into marketing to make money?

Slashdot Top Deals

Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky

Working...